Page 43 of Cross Ice

“I know you were a disaster at two in the morning and that you texted him the next day. I don’t know what happened when he came over.” He pointed at me. “Sit. Talk.”

I sat. I talked.

I told him everything. The dinner, the couch, telling Nico the full Ryan story from sixteen onward. Danny already knew that history—he’d heard it in the early San Jose days when I’d been raw enough to tell it without editing. He listened now the way he had then, without interrupting.

When I got to the name change, he nodded slowly. “And Nico understood.”

“Immediately.”

“Good.” Simple and certain. “What did he say about Ryan?”

“He said he’d never watch one of his films again.” I paused. “He was going to tell his captain. Start a thing.”

Danny stared at me for a moment. Then he laughed, loud and genuine. “I already like him more.”

“I told him not to start a thing.”

“Obviously the thing is happening.” He took a sip of his beer. “And then?”

I told Danny most of it. The bedroom was Nico’s and mine, and Danny knew without being told that some things weren’t his to ask about.

“You seem different,” he said finally.

“Different how?”

He considered it. “Less like you’re waiting for something to go wrong.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Mostly because he wasn’t wrong.

“Okay.” He grabbed the remote. “I’ve seen the Instagram. Now show me what he actually does.”

The Lasers were playing Anaheim, and Danny knew enough about hockey to explain what I was looking at while it was happening, which turned out to be necessary. The game was faster than I’d expected, faster and more physical, the players moving at a speed that made it hard to track who had the puck and why everyone kept stopping.

“There,” Danny said, pointing. “Number seventeen. Left side.”

I found him.

He was different on the ice. I’d known, intellectually, that he would be. The Wikipedia page had said one of the premier power forwards of his generation in the dry tone of someone stating established fact, but knowing it and watching it were not the same thing. He moved with a certainty that I recognized—the same deliberate confidence he brought into my apartment, but amplified and directed and frightening in a way that made me grip my beer a little tighter.

“He’s fast,” I said.

“He’s one of the fastest in the league.” Danny glanced at me. “You didn’t know that?”

“I didn’t know anything. I don’t follow hockey.”

“You follow one hockey player.”

“Shut up.”

He grinned and let it go, but I was already watching the ice again.

The goal happened in the second period. A play I didn’t fully understand—something with the puck moving between players too quickly for me to track—and then Nico was in front of the net, the puck was in it, and the arena exploded. He raised both arms, his teammates crashed into him, and his face was open in a way I recognized from a photo I’d seen online. Pure joy.

That was him. In front of eighteen thousand people, with his arms in the air, he was still just Nico.

Something settled in my chest that had been unsettled since Thursday night.

“You’ve got it bad,” Danny said pleasantly.